2Amys Wins D.C.'s Sole Spot on List of Top Pizzas

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According to The Daily Meal, this is the home of the best pizza in America: Frank Pepe's Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut. Washington's own 2 Amys was number 20 on the list. (2008 photo by Christopher Capozziello/Getty Images)

When one thinks of truly great pizza -- melting, sauce-spiked, with the perfect balance of topping to chewy crust with just enough bite -- one does not necessarily think of the nation's capital. We do half-smokes and mumbo sauce and noodles and cupcakes and gourmet hamburgers just fine, but pizza is not in our traditional recipe book.

So thank you, 2Amys, for saving Washington D.C. from complete pizza humiliation on The Daily Meal's list of the 101 best pizzas in America.

The Cathedral Heights restaurant was Washington's sole entry on the list, which was dominated by pizza-famous locales including Philadelphia, New Jersey, Chicago, Boston, most of the New York City boroughs and California.

Though one NoVa restaurant won a mention as well: Pupatella, the Arlington pizza place that began as a food truck in 2007. The Daily Meal said that Pupatella's "oven’s bricks were built using volcanic ash from Vesuvius."

2Amys got credit for adhering to the Denominazione di Origine Controllata's traditional standards for Neapolitan pizza. According to 2 Amy's web site, only soft-grain flour, fresh yeast, water, and sea salt may be used for the dough, and only Italian plum tomatoes, mozzarella di bufala, extra-virgin olive oil and fresh basil or dried oregano may be used for the toppings. The pizza must be cooked in a wood-burning oven.

"When you bite into one of their pizzas, you know that you are getting a quintessential traditional pie," The Daily Meal writes.

The restaurant's signature pie is "better than a good number of pizzerias in New York," which, putting regional pride aside, is a high compliment in pizza.

The No. 1 pizza on the list? the White Clam Pie at Frank Pepe's in New Haven, Conn. It's a slightly non-traditional pizza, but Frank Pepe's are old-school pizza experts, who opened in 1925 providing traditional Neapolitan-style pies.